(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Marasi picks her way through the warehouse with MeLaan, her rifle strap a weight on her shoulder, worried the carpenters will hear her boots on the packed dirt. Activity is muted but not silent: someone is still sawing planks against the far wall, and the engineers around the ship keep exclaiming at it *as if they're not the ones who built it in the first place*. Marasi suspects they are new to the project. The two women slip past a small table of soldiers playing cards and reach the south wall, where actual rooms have been built into the structure — finished, with doors and the occasional window. Living quarters, maybe. They have no idea where the spike would even be kept. *Maybe a desk drawer*, MeLaan says, *or a safe — or they may have just thrown it away.* When Marasi sees the limping man — the same one from the train robbery — leading scientists up the gangway into the boat, she has an idea: get in there.

Wax moves the opposite direction through the supply pallets, feeling the weight of how much has changed while he was away. Motorcars, electric lights, skyscrapers, concrete roads, and now warships, Allomantic grenades, bracers one Feruchemist fills and another uses. He cannot help feeling like a dusty old relic. Wayne joins him and pulls out his sturdy leather canteen — apple juice, *good for the body* — and they pick the temporary construction catwalks ringing the upper warehouse as a vantage. Wax has no metal in his stomach (too easy to use reflexively), so he has to climb the ladders like an ordinary man, getting winded by the third tier, while Wayne needles him about his twilight years. He steps onto the bottom catwalk; the board cracks under his foot and his leg goes through, leaving him for the first time in a long while aware of how far the ground is. An engineer leans over the upper rail and recognises him. Wayne boosts off Wax, catches the railing, yanks the engineer down by the ankle, and follows up with a second thump. Wayne holds the unconscious engineer's head over the railing like a puppet and answers his own question through the man's voice, ribbing Wax for forgetting he had just thrown the bloke up there. Memory loss. Twilight years again.

Down in the wrecked ship, Irich is shuffling his latest batch of outer-cities scholars through the corridors with a new gait — step, cane, shuffle, breathe — and trying not to dwell on the suffocation his physician has promised him. Everyone in the world is dying very slowly; Irich's curse is that he can feel it happening. His Set rank of Array is meaningless to him; he serves only for the miracle Suit has promised. He shows Stanoux, Stansi, and Javie the corridor's golden ceiling patterns (Stansi thinks one looks like a ship) and explains the puzzle: rooms hung with executioner-style black hoods, instruments that make no sound, plumbing with facilities for two genders *plus a third* marked with an indecipherable symbol. He brings them to the hold and shows the hearth-shaped power plant — lightweight metal, lines running away along the walls like a spiderweb. *How does this thing move?* he asks them. *It defies all scientific knowledge available to us.* Stanoux asks after the crew. *Uncooperative*, Irich says, *and somewhat fragile.* The language barrier is so far insurmountable. He needs Stanoux for the ancient anteverdant books, Stansi and Javie for the engineers — *imagine the power we would have with a fleet of such ships. We would dominate the Basin.* Stansi says aloud she does not want *any group* with such power. Irich makes a note to coach Suit on rhetoric for academics.

Someone calls his name from down the corridor. He limps back, finds no one — and on his way back out, spots a small wall compartment popped open with a silvery cube dropped to the floor. His heart leaps. Another of the devices. He will tell Suit one of his spies recovered it in New Seran. The punishments might be lifted; he might even be allowed to join the expedition to the second site. He pockets it, sets a soldier to watch the scientists, and hobbles out of the ship in a hurry.

Back in the closets, Marasi cracks her door and watches Irich limp out through the hole in the hull; MeLaan slips across the corridor to track where he goes. *Now what?* — *We wait just a bit longer.*

From the catwalk, Wax sees the same thing she does, only from above. He had been bothered all along by the ship — flat, plank-smooth tops; gunwales like fort crenellations; no masts at all, not even broken stumps. After a circuit of the catwalk he has no sign of his uncle. Then the limping man comes back out of the boat, looking anxious about something — *did those two women do that?* — crosses the warehouse, and ducks into a small guard chamber at the southwest corner. As the door swings open Wax gets a full second of view inside.

His sister is in there. Telsin sits at a small table, loomed over by the thick-armed Coinshot Wax fought on the train. He nearly drops the spyglass. The door swings shut. He starts to rise and reaches for a metal vial — *whoa, whoa, mate*, Wayne says, grabbing his arm. *I'm all for charging in recklessly, but don't you think we should talk this through?* Wax tells him this is why he came. Telsin will know things. Wayne notes uncomfortably that he is having to be the voice of reason here. Then he sticks his gum to a support beam and lays out his plan: there is a very nice engineer's outfit on the unconscious man over the railing, and ever since that party half a year back, he has been working on his *smart-person talk*.